The St. Frattie’s Day Address

Four months and a handful of years ago your brothers brought forth on your chapter, a new expulsion, conceived in Ignorance, and dedicated to removing GreekRank posts based on your proposition that not all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great crackdown, testing whether we can’t throw down in our dorms like you sickos, or if any organization so idiotic and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great cornfield of that party. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their college educations that their brother’s might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that Vandy should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this frat, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1869